John Carpenter's The Thing (1982) is famous for oozily gruesome special effects, impressively tight plotting, and for one of Kurt Russell's
most iconic paranoid-tough-guy performances. What truly distinguishes it from the toothy horror film horde, though, is something it lacks: women. The
film is set on a research base in Antarctica, and the entire cast is male.

Scriptwriter Bill Lancaster explained the lack of women in The Thing like this:

In reality there aren't any women in these kinds of situations. I remember thinking as a kid that the obligatory love scenes in horror movies
interrupted the action.

Fair enough, but there's a reason that all those other films have those obligatory love scenes and, indeed, those women. The Thing is
basically a sci-fi slasher, and an important part of the appeal of slasher films (as Halloween director John Carpenter well knew) was that the
R rating gave the (mostly) male audience a chance to see some T and some A. For that matter, The Thing's most direct precursor was surely Alien—a film that suggested strongly that slasher/sci-fi audiences would pay good money to see a hot female protagonist kicking alien ass.
Horror films aren't about reality in the first place, they're about genre requirements. And the genre requirements for slashers generally include women
not just as love interests, but as the main protagonists (a la Halloween, Friday the 13th, and on and on.) So why write
them out?

Part of the answer is John Carpenter, a director who, in Christine, They Live, and many other films, has been particularly interested in male-male relationships. And part of the answer, perhaps, is provided by queer theorist Eve Sedgwick. In Epistemology of the Closet, Sedgwick argued that Western culture is "structured—indeed fractured—by a chronic, now endemic crisis of homo/heterosexual definition." Basically, for Sedgwick, male identity always inevitably collapses into an agonized, shapeless horror. Strong, manly men who are male-focused and uninterested in femininity are in danger of becoming homosexual not-men. On the other hand, men who are too women-identified are also in danger of becoming not-men—a.k.a. things.

Thus, women in The Thing would be out of place, as would male-female love. This is because The Thing can be read as being obsessed with the fear of failing to
be a man—and, concurrently, with homosexual panic.

The men in the original are constantly examining each other for evidence of the Thing, the spreading contagion that may make them not-men

The Thing of the title is an alien protoplasm that devours and mimics other organisms—it passes, if you will, as human. One by one, the men on the
base are devoured and replaced. That replacement often has a queasy sexual component; one of the researchers, for example, is covered with slithery,
bondage-like tentacles. In the film's most spectacular scene, another scientist reveals his Thingness when a replica of his own head bursts from his
stomach in a twisted all-male mockery of birth.

The men in The Thing are constantly examining each other for evidence of the Thing, the spreading contagion that may make them not-men. The hero,
MacReady (Russell), is heroic precisely because he is the most paranoid and the least subject to emotional attachments. To give him a female love interest
would both undermine the source of his strength and ruin the apocalyptic, eroticized, male hot-house orgy of Thingness.

In the new The Thing, a prequel to the 1982 version, director Matthijs van Heijningen, Jr., jettisons this dynamic quickly and thoroughly. Not
only are there two women in the film, but one of them Kate (Mary Elizabeth Winstead) is the hero.

If you like slashers, especially sci-fi slashers like Alien, the prequel is a thoroughly entertaining genre exercise. But what's really
fascinating about it is watching how the female protagonist changes the film. Carpenter's movie was an ensemble piece; the men all behaved like lovably
bitchy character actors, strutting about, fighting for dominance, and generally getting on one anothers nerves in their arctic clubhouse. In the
prequel, there are still interpersonal tensions—but they're all funneled through Kate. She has a sort-of sexless romance thing with cute lab
assistant Adam (Eric Christian Olsen); she's got authority/daddy issues with Halverson (Ulrich Thomsen), the scientific leader/soulless Vulcan
character; she has a female-bonding partner in Juliette (Kim Bubbs).

As that suggests, having Kate be the star pushes the relationships towards more stably stereotypical forms. Not coincidentally, it also works to undo
the aura of paranoia—or at least, to de-eroticize it. When Kate gives someone a searching look, it reads (ahem) straightforwardly as a woman trying
to determine if a man is a threat, rather than as a man checking another man out. Moreoever, despite nationalistic tensions between the Norwegians and
Americans on the base, Kate consistently establishes the kinds of relationships that no one in Carpenter's film could manage. She forms a bond of trust
with Lars (Jergen Langhelle), and later with American Joel Edgerton (Sam Carter). These aren't sexual relationships—like many a slasher heroine, Kate
has no discernable sexual interests—but they do seem predicated on the neatness of male-female pairings. Kate interlocks with others in a way
MacReady could not.

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This is natural enough. MacReady's strength was his paranoia; his refusal to trust anyone. Kate's strength is her empathy; her ability to figure out
whom to rely on. In the first film, MacReady (in a perhaps deliberate nod to the AIDS epidemic) figured out a macabre blood test to tell who was Thing
and who wasn't. Kate develops a much more ad hoc method, relying not on science but on careful everyday observation. Effectively, Kate knows
her companions better than they know themselves. MacReady ends his film locked in paranoid tryst with a rival/colleague, freezing together in a cold
tableau of mistrust. Kate sees and feels more clearly, which—spoiler alert—is why she gets to be that happy slasher staple, the Final Girl.

That ending suggests the biggest difference between the films. The emotional point of slashers, as Carol Clover argues in her 1993 book Men, Women, and Chainsaws, is the extended rush of masochistic terror and the final thrill of cleansing, righteous violence. The protagonists
are so often women because women are weaker and more empathetic—and thus the thrill is all the greater when they turn the tables and triumph.
Slashers are about cathartic victory.

Carpenter's The Thing was not. Instead, it assiduously scrambled hero and villain: Even MacReady seems like he could be a Thing at times. Men
can't be trusted, and so none of them can escape. Add a woman, though, and suddenly there's someone to care about and to rely on. Nearly thirty years after
Carpenter's The Thing, and Hollywood still has trouble imagining men knowing each other. Trust between men, or love between men, is still a
hard thing to come by—at least in the movies.

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The legend of the Confederate leader’s heroism and decency is based in the fiction of a person who never existed.

The strangest part about the continued personality cult of Robert E. Lee is how few of the qualities his admirers profess to see in him he actually possessed.

Memorial Day has the tendency to conjure up old arguments about the Civil War. That’s understandable; it was created to mourn the dead of a war in which the Union was nearly destroyed, when half the country rose up in rebellion in defense of slavery. This year, the removal of Lee’s statue in New Orleans has inspired a new round of commentary about Lee, not to mention protests on his behalf by white supremacists.

The myth of Lee goes something like this: He was a brilliant strategist and devoted Christian man who abhorred slavery and labored tirelessly after the war to bring the country back together.

On August 21, the “moon” will pass between the Earth and the sun, obscuring the light of the latter. The government agency NASA says this will result in “one of nature’s most awe-inspiring sights.” The astronomers there claim to have calculated down to the minute exactly when and where this will happen, and for how long. They have reportedly known about this eclipse for years, just by virtue of some sort of complex math.

This seems extremely unlikely. I can’t even find these eclipse calculations on their website to check them for myself.

Meanwhile the scientists tell us we can’t look at it without special glasses because “looking directly at the sun is unsafe.”

Just seven months into his presidency, Trump appears to have achieved a status usually reserved for the final months of a term.

In many ways, the Trump presidency never got off the ground: The president’s legislative agenda is going nowhere, his relations with foreign leaders are frayed, and his approval rating with the American people never enjoyed the honeymoon period most newly elected presidents do. Pundits who are sympathetic toward, or even neutral on, the president keep hoping that the next personnel move—the appointment of White House Chief of Staff John Kelly, say, or the long-rumored-but-never-delivered departure of Steve Bannon—will finally get the White House in gear.

But what if they, and many other people, are thinking about it wrong? Maybe the reality is not that the Trump presidency has never gotten started. It’s that he’s already reached his lame-duck period. For most presidents, that comes in the last few months of a term. For Trump, it appears to have arrived early, just a few months into his term. The president did always brag that he was a fast learner.

An analysis of Stormfront forums shows a sometimes sophisticated understanding of the limits of ancestry tests.

The white-nationalist forum Stormfront hosts discussions on a wide range of topics, from politics to guns to The Lord of the Rings. And of particular and enduring interest: genetic ancestry tests. For white nationalists, DNA tests are a way to prove their racial purity. Of course, their results don’t always come back that way. And how white nationalists try to explain away non-European ancestry is rather illuminating of their beliefs.

Two years ago—before Donald Trump was elected president, before white nationalism had become central to the political conversation—Aaron Panofsky and Joan Donovan, sociologists then at the University of California, Los Angeles, set out to study Stormfront forum posts about genetic ancestry tests. They presented their study at the American Sociological Association meeting this Monday. (A preprint of the paper is now online.) After the events in Charlottesville this week, their research struck a particular chord with the audience.

More comfortable online than out partying, post-Millennials are safer, physically, than adolescents have ever been. But they’re on the brink of a mental-health crisis.

One day last summer, around noon, I called Athena, a 13-year-old who lives in Houston, Texas. She answered her phone—she’s had an iPhone since she was 11—sounding as if she’d just woken up. We chatted about her favorite songs and TV shows, and I asked her what she likes to do with her friends. “We go to the mall,” she said. “Do your parents drop you off?,” I asked, recalling my own middle-school days, in the 1980s, when I’d enjoy a few parent-free hours shopping with my friends. “No—I go with my family,” she replied. “We’ll go with my mom and brothers and walk a little behind them. I just have to tell my mom where we’re going. I have to check in every hour or every 30 minutes.”

Those mall trips are infrequent—about once a month. More often, Athena and her friends spend time together on their phones, unchaperoned. Unlike the teens of my generation, who might have spent an evening tying up the family landline with gossip, they talk on Snapchat, the smartphone app that allows users to send pictures and videos that quickly disappear. They make sure to keep up their Snapstreaks, which show how many days in a row they have Snapchatted with each other. Sometimes they save screenshots of particularly ridiculous pictures of friends. “It’s good blackmail,” Athena said. (Because she’s a minor, I’m not using her real name.) She told me she’d spent most of the summer hanging out alone in her room with her phone. That’s just the way her generation is, she said. “We didn’t have a choice to know any life without iPads or iPhones. I think we like our phones more than we like actual people.”

Antifa’s activists say they’re battling burgeoning authoritarianism on the American right. Are they fueling it instead?

Since 1907, Portland, Oregon, has hosted an annual Rose Festival. Since 2007, the festival had included a parade down 82nd Avenue. Since 2013, the Republican Party of Multnomah County, which includes Portland, had taken part. This April, all of that changed.

In the days leading up to the planned parade, a group called the Direct Action Alliance declared, “Fascists plan to march through the streets,” and warned, “Nazis will not march through Portland unopposed.” The alliance said it didn’t object to the Multnomah GOP itself, but to “fascists” who planned to infiltrate its ranks. Yet it also denounced marchers with “Trump flags” and “red maga hats” who could “normalize support for an orange man who bragged about sexually harassing women and who is waging a war of hate, racism and prejudice.” A second group, Oregon Students Empowered, created a Facebook page called “Shut down fascism! No nazis in Portland!”

Anti-Semitic logic fueled the violence over the weekend, no matter what the president says.

The “Unite the Right” rally in Charlottesville was ostensibly about protecting a statue of Robert E. Lee. It was about asserting the legitimacy of “white culture” and white supremacy, and defending the legacy of the Confederacy.

So why did the demonstrators chant anti-Semitic lines like “Jews will not replace us”?

The demonstration was suffused with anti-black racism, but also with anti-Semitism. Marchers displayed swastikas on banners and shouted slogans like “blood and soil,” a phrase drawn from Nazi ideology. “This city is run by Jewish communists and criminal niggers,” one demonstrator told Vice News’ Elspeth Reeve during their march. As Jews prayed at a local synagogue, Congregation Beth Israel, men dressed in fatigues carrying semi-automatic rifles stood across the street, according to the temple’s president. Nazi websites posted a call to burn their building. As a precautionary measure, congregants had removed their Torah scrolls and exited through the back of the building when they were done praying.

The nation’s current post-truth moment is the ultimate expression of mind-sets that have made America exceptional throughout its history.

When did America become untethered from reality?

I first noticed our national lurch toward fantasy in 2004, after President George W. Bush’s political mastermind, Karl Rove, came up with the remarkable phrase reality-based community. People in “the reality-based community,” he told a reporter, “believe that solutions emerge from your judicious study of discernible reality … That’s not the way the world really works anymore.” A year later, The Colbert Report went on the air. In the first few minutes of the first episode, Stephen Colbert, playing his right-wing-populist commentator character, performed a feature called “The Word.” His first selection: truthiness. “Now, I’m sure some of the ‘word police,’ the ‘wordinistas’ over at Webster’s, are gonna say, ‘Hey, that’s not a word!’ Well, anybody who knows me knows that I’m no fan of dictionaries or reference books.

If the president is concerned about violence on the left, he can start by fighting the white supremacist movements whose growth has fueled its rise.

In his Tuesday press conference, Donald Trump talked at length about what he called “the alt left.” White supremacists, he claimed, weren’t the only people in Charlottesville last weekend that deserved condemnation. “You had a group on the other side that was also very violent,” he declared. “Nobody wants to say that.”

I can say with great confidence that Trump’s final sentence is untrue. I can do so because the September issue of TheAtlantic contains an essay of mine entitled “The Rise of the Violent Left,” which discusses the very phenomenon that Trump claims “nobody wants” to discuss. Trump is right that, in Charlottesville and beyond, the violence of some leftist activists constitutes a real problem. Where he’s wrong is in suggesting that it’s a problem in any way comparable to white supremacism.